That fine, dry, wiry wild grass in hollows in woods and sprout-lands

June 11

What if we feel a yearning to which no breast answers? I walk alone. My heart is full. Feelings impede the current of my thoughts. I knock on the earth but no friend appears, and perhaps none is dreaming of me. 

Now (September 16, ’55), after four or five months of invalidity and worthlessness, I begin to feel some stirrings of life in me. 

Is not that carex, Pennsylvanica-like, with a long spike (one inch long by one half-inch wide), C. bullata? 

What a difference between one red-wing blackbird’s egg and another’s! C. finds one long as a robin’s, but narrow, with large black spots on larger end and on side, on or between the bushes by riverside; another much shorter, with a large black spot on the side. Both pale-blue ground. 

The early willows at the bridge are apparently either S. discolor or eriocephala, or both. 

I have noticed the green oak-balls some days. 

Now observe the dark evergreen of June. 

The target leaf is eaten above. 

In order to get the deserted tanager’s nest at the top [of] a pitch pine which was too weak to climb, we carried a rope in our pockets and took three rails a quarter of a mile into the woods, and there rigged a derrick, by which I climbed to a level with the nest, and I could see if there were eggs in it. I have the nest. Tied the three tops together and spread the bottoms. 

Carex cephalophora (?) on Heywood’s Peak. 

That fine, dry, wiry wild grass in hollows in woods and sprout-lands, never mown, is apparently the C. Pennsylvanica, or early sedge. 

There are young bluebirds.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 11, 1855

No friend appears, and perhaps none is dreaming of me. See March 28, 1856 ("Farewell, my friends, my path inclines to this side the mountain, yours to that."): February 8, 1857 ("I know that in love there is no mistake, and that every estrangement is well founded."); November 3, 1858 ("How long we will follow an illusion! On meeting that one whom I call my friend, I find that I had imagined something that was not there.")

What a difference between one red-wing blackbird’s egg and another’s! See May 20, 1853 ("Probably a red-wing blackbird's nest, of grass, hung between two button-bushes; whitish eggs with irregular black marks"); May 25, 1855 ("Red-wing’s nest with four eggs — white, very faintly tinged with (perhaps) green and curiously and neatly marked with brown-black spots and lines on the large end.”); June 1, 1857 ("A red-wing's nest, four eggs, low in a tuft of sedge in an open meadow. What Champollion can translate the hieroglyphics on these eggs? It is always writing of the same character, though much diversified. While the bird picks up the material and lays the egg, who determines the style of the marking?"); June 12, 1855 ("At mouth of Mill Brook, a red-wing’s nest tied on to that thick, high grass and some low willow, eighteen inches from ground, with four eggs variously marked, full of young.”) ; June 28, 1855 ('Two red-wings’ nests, four eggs and three —one without any black marks.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Red-wing in Spring

The tanager’s nest at the top of a pitch pine. See June 8, 1855 ("A tanager’s nest in the topmost forks of a pitch pine about fifteen feet high, by Thrush Alley; the nest very slight, apparently of pine needles, twigs, etc.; can see through it; bird on.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Scarlet Tanager

That fine, dry, wiry wild grass in hollows in woods and sprout-lands, never mown, is apparently the C. Pennsylvanica, or early sedge. See July 10, 1860 ("I was exhilarated by the mass of cheerful bright-yellowish light reflected from the sedge (Carex Pennsylvanica) growing densely on the hillsides laid bare within a year or two there. It is of a distinct cheerful yellow color even this overcast day, even as if they were reflecting a bright sunlight, though no sun is visible")

Young bluebirds. See  June 13, 1852 ("I hear the feeble plaintive note of young bluebirds, just trying their wings or getting used to them");  June 13, 1858 ("I hear the peculiar notes of young bluebirds that have flown. "); July 12, 1856 ("Hear the plaintive note of young bluebirds.") See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Young Birds

June 11. See A Book of the Seasons by Henry Thoreau, June 11

What a difference

between one red-wing blackbird’s

egg and another’s! 

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, 

That fine, dry, wiry wild grass in hollows in woods and sprout-lands

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau 

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2025

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-550611 

A morning rainbow. A moonlit walk. A flower for every mood of the mind.

June 25.

Just as the sun rises this morning, under clouds, I see a rainbow in the west horizon, the lower parts quite bright. 

A few moments after, it rains heavily for a half-hour; and it continues cloudy as well as cool most of the day.

I observe that young birds are usually of a duller color and more speckled than old ones, as if for their protection in their tender state. They have not yet the markings (and the beauty) which distinguish their species, and which betray it often, but by their colors are merged in the variety of colors of the season.

To Cliffs, 4 P.M. 

It is cool and cloudy weather in which the crickets, still heard, remind you of the fall, -a clearer ring to their creak. . . .

Sometimes the lambkill flowers form a very even rounded, close cylinder, six inches long and two and a half in diameter, of rich red saucer-like flowers, the counterpart of the latifolia in flowers and flower- buds, but higher colored. I regard it as a beautiful flower neglected. It has a slight but not remarkable scent. 

The Convolvulus sepium, bindweed; morning-glory is the best name. It always refreshes me to see it. Some saw it the 19th. In the morning and cloudy weather, says Gray. I associate it with holiest morning hours. It may preside over my morning walks and thoughts. 

There is a flower for every mood of the mind.

Methinks roses oftenest display their high colors, colors which invariably attract all eyes and betray them, against a dark ground, as the dark green or the shady recesses of the bushes and copses, where they show to best advantage. Their enemies do not spare the open flower for an hour. Hence, if for no other reason, their buds are most beautiful. Their promise of perfect and dazzling beauty, when their buds are just beginning to expand, — beauty which they can hardly contain, — as in most youths, commonly surpasses the fulfillment of their expanded flowers. The color shows fairest and brightest in the bud. The expanded flower has no higher or deeper tint than the swelling bud exposed. This raised a dangerous expectation. 

The season when wild roses are in bloom should have some preeminence, methinks.


Agreeable is this cool cloudy weather, favorable to thought, after the sultry days. 

The air is clear, as if a cool, dewy brush had swept the vales and meadows of all haze. A liquid coolness invests them, as if their midnight aspect were suddenly revealed to midday. 

The mountain outline is remarkably distinct, and the intermediate earth appears more than usually scooped out, like a vast saucer sloping up ward to its sharp mountain rim. The mountains are washed in air. 

The sunshine, now seen far away on fields and hills in the northwest, looks cool and whole some, like the yellow grass in the meadows.

I am too late for the white pine flowers. The cones are half an inch long and greenish, and the male flowers effete.

The sun now comes out bright, though westering, and shines on Fair Haven, rippled by the wind.

8.30 p. m. — To Conantum. 

Moon half full. Fields dusky; the evening star and one other bright one near the moon. It is a cool but pretty still night. 

Methinks I am less thoughtful than I was last year at this time. The flute I now hear from the Depot Field does not find such caverns to echo and resound in in my mind, — no such answering depths. Our minds should echo at least as many times as a Mammoth Cave to every musical sound. It should awaken reflections in us. 

I hear not many crickets. 

Some children calling their kitten home by some endearing name. 

Now his day's work is done, the laborer plays his flute, — only possible at this hour. 

Contrasted with his work, what an accomplishment! Some drink and gamble. He plays some well-known march. But the music is not in the tune; it is in the sound. It does not proceed from the trading nor political world. He practices this ancient art. 

There are light, vaporous clouds overhead; dark, fuscous ones in the north. The trees are turned black. As candles are lit on earth, stars are lit in the heavens. I hear the bullfrog's trump from afar. 

Now I turn down the Corner road. At this quiet hour the evening wind is heard to moan in the hollows of your face, mysterious, spirit-like, conversing with you. It can be heard now only. The whip-poor-will sings. 

I hear a laborer going home, coarsely singing to himself. Though he has scarcely had a thought all day, killing weeds, at this hour he sings or talks to himself. His humble, earthy contentment gets expression. It is kindred in its origin with the notes or music of many creatures. A more fit and natural expression of his mood, this humming, than conversation is wont to be. 

The fireflies appear to be flying, though they may be stationary on the grass stems, for their perch and the nearness of the ground are obscured by the darkness, and now you see one here and then another there, as if it were one in motion. Their light is singularly bright and glowing to proceed from a living creature. Nature loves variety in all things, and so she adds glow-worms to fireflies, though I have not noticed any this year. 

The great story of the night is the moon's adventures with the clouds. What innumerable encounters she has had with them! 

When I enter on the moonlit causeway, where the light is reflected from the glistening alder leaves, and their deep, dark, liquid shade beneath strictly bounds the firm damp road and narrows it, it seems like autumn. The rows of willows completely fence the way and appear to converge in perspective, as I had not noticed by day. 

The bullfrogs are of various tones. Some horse in a distant pasture whinnies; dogs bark; there is that dull, dumping sound of frogs, as if a bubble containing the lifeless sultry air of day burst on the surface, a belching sound. When two or more bullfrogs trump together, it is a ten-pound-ten note. 

In Conant's meadow I hear the gurgling of unwearied water, the trill of a toad, and go through the cool, primordial liquid air that has settled there. As I sit on the great door-step, the loose clapboards on the old house rattle in the wind weirdly, and I seem to hear some wild mice running about on the floor, and sometimes a loud crack from some weary timber trying to change its position. 

On Conantum-top, all white objects like stones are observed, and dark masses of foliage, at a distance even. How distant is day and its associations! 

The light, dry cladonia lichens on the brows of hills reflect the moon light well, looking like rocks. The night wind comes cold and whispering, murmuring weirdly from distant mountain-tops. No need to climb the Andes or Himalayas, for brows of lowest hills are highest mountain-tops in cool moonlight nights. 

Is it a cuckoo's chuckling note I heard? Occasionally there is something enormous and monstrous in the size and distance of objects. A rock, is it? or an elephant asleep? Are these trees on an upland or a lowland? Or do they skirt the brink of a sea-beach? When I get there, shall I look off over the sea? 

The whiteweed is the only obvious flower. I see the tops of the rye wave, and grain-fields are more interesting than by day. The water is dull-colored, hardly more bright than a rye-field. There is dew only in the low grounds. 

What were the firefly's light, if it were not for darkness? The one implies the other. 

You may not suspect that the milk of the cocoanut which is imported from the other side of the world is mixed. So pure do some truths come to us, I trust. 

What a mean and wretched creature is man! By and by some Dr. Morton may be filling your cranium with white mustard seed to learn its internal capacity. Of  all ways invented to come at a knowledge of a living man, this seems to me the worst, as it is the most belated. You would learn more by once paring the toe nails of the living subject. There is nothing out of which the spirit has more completely departed, and in which it has left fewer significant traces.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 25, 1852

The mountain outline is remarkably distinct, the earth appears like a vast saucer sloping upward to its sharp mountain rim. See November 30, 1852 (“The country seems to slope up from the west end of Walden to the mountain.”)

The fireflies appear to be flying . . . now you see one here and then another there, as if it were one in motion. See August 2, 1854 (“A few fireflies in the meadows. I am uncertain whether that so large and bright and high was a firefly or a shooting star.”)

The Convolvulus sepium, bindweed; morning-glory is the best name. It always refreshes me to see it.") See  June 21, 1853 ("The morning-glory still fresh at 3 P.M.  A fine, large, delicate bell with waved border, some pure white ,some reddened. The buds open perfectly in a vase I find them open when I wake at 4 A .M. Is not this one of the eras or culminating places in the flower season? Not this till the sultry mornings come."); July 19, 1851("The wild morning-glory or bindweed, with its delicate red and white blossoms.")

There is a flower for every mood of the mind. See May 23, 1853 (" Every new flower that opens, no doubt, expresses a new mood of the human mind.”); August 7, 1853 ("The objects I behold correspond to my mood.”); May 6, 1854 ("I can be said to note the flower's fall only when I see in it the symbol of my own change. When I experience this, then the flower appears to me.”); June 6, 1857 (“Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Moods and Seasons of the Mind.

Roses oftenest display their high colors. . . fairest and brightest in the bud. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wild Rose

Sometimes the lambkill flowers form a very even rounded, close cylinder . . . of rich red saucer-like flowers. . . I regard it as a beautiful flower neglected. See June 13, 1852 ('Lambkill is out. I remember with what delight I used to discover this flower in dewy mornings."); June 13, 1854 ("How beautiful the solid cylinders of the lamb-kill now just before sunset, — small ten-sided, rosy-crimson basins, about two inches above the recurved, drooping dry capsules of last year"); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Lambkill (Kalmia augustifolia)

Methinks I am less thoughtful than I was last year at this time. See July 7, 1852 "(I am older than last year; the mornings are further between; the days are fewer.")

Dr. Morton filling your cranium with white mustard seed. Samuel George Morton believed that cranial capacity determined intellectual ability, and he used his craniometric evidence in conjunction with his analysis of anthropological literature then available to argue in favor of a racial hierarchy which put Caucasians on the top rung and Africans on the bottom. Morton's "systematic justification" for the separation of races was used by those who favored slavery in the United States.~ wikipedia

July 25. See A Book of the Seasons,, by Henry Thoreau, June 25

The earth is a vast

saucer sloping upward to

its sharp mountain rim.

June 25, 1852

Sunshine now seen far

away looks like the yellow

grass in the meadows.

June 25, 1852

I am too late for

the white pine flowers. -- The cones

are half an inch long.

June 25, 1852

The sun comes out bright

and shines on Fair Haven Pond,

rippled by the wind.

June 25, 1852

There is a flower 

for every mood of the mind –

wild roses in bloom. 

June 25, 1852

Why the firefly's light,

if it were not for darkness?

One implies the other.

June 25, 1852

You see one here and

another there as if it

were one in motion.

June 25, 1852

A Book of the Seasons,by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021